Hell’s Heart

Chapter Eight. Sharing

CHAPTER

EIGHT

Sharing

We’ll come back to the captain later. She’s important, obviously. Incredibly important. Changed-my-life important. Hell, she nearly changed my life the most a life can possibly be changed.

But that’s all to come. We wouldn’t meet for days yet, and though looking back I remember that first sight of her name like it was this huge turning point for me, it wasn’t really.

It was just a name. Could have been anything.

Asa. Asha. Abigail. Names mean less than people think they do.

Or more. I’m still trying to work that one out.

I wasn’t quite confident enough to sign aboard an unknown ship with an unknown captain about to set forth on an unknown voyage without at least consulting with the woman I’d just agreed to go shipboard with.

So I looped back to the Coffin in the hopes that Q would already be there.

I found her sitting in the common room. She had one leg stretched out on a scrimshawed bench and was reading a book without acknowledging me.

I say reading; she was flipping through pages, about fifty at a time, holding each of those fifty pages briefly up to her little glass idol before moving on to the next set.

For a while I just sat and watched her. Which—yes, now that I say it, comes across as a bit creepy. But she seemed busy with what she was doing and I didn’t want to interrupt her. And she was fascinating to watch. Although there is the tiniest chance that by fascinating I mostly just mean hot.

There’s sort of a morbid joke I’ll sometimes make that the way to my heart is through my ribs with a knife.

Since Q had woken me up last night with a blade at my throat I’d begun to think that might be literally true.

Over the space of less than twenty-four hours I’d gone from being terrifyingly aware of all the awful things she might do to me to being terrifyingly aware of all the awful things I wanted her to do to me.

I might, as a result, have gotten ever so slightly lost in reverie so when she finished the book and started talking to me I almost blanked her.

“Ship,” she said for what I hoped was only the second time. “Habes?”

“Yes.” I gave an exaggerated nod, which made me feel incredibly silly. I knew she understood yes and no. “But I’ve not signed anything, so if you don’t like it you can back out.”

Q shrugged. “Confido. I trust.”

That was … honestly probably more than I deserved. “And sorry,” I added, “for ditching you earlier. I just … it’s complicated.”

“Complicated?” Q repeated. “That building. Ecclesia? Church?”

I nodded. “More a chapel, but yes. I was raised Plutonian.”

She frowned. Then she held the little idol up to her face and said to it, “Plutonian. Church.”

Symbols skittered across its surface and her eyes darted left and right across them, as though reading extremely quickly. I felt my mouth go a little dry as I watched her.

“Et iterum dico,” she said, and seemed to be quoting, “vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum.”

I looked down, ashamed at how little I understood. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

“Rich man,” she tried. “Camel?”

With a slightly embarrassing sigh of relief, I realized what she meant. “Oh, yes. It is as easy for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle.”

She looked confused. Which was fair enough. It was a confusing verse. Not least because nobody had seen a camel since before the founding of the Commonwealth.

“Historically,” I explained, “the eye of the needle was the main road into one of the Holy Cities of Old Earth and a camel was some kind of riding animal that went up that road all the time. So although it seems like it’s saying it’s hard for rich people to get into heaven, it’s actually saying the opposite. ”

For a while she stared at me, half smiling, almost like she was expecting me to say that it was a joke. Then she just said, “Non intellego.”

That one I’d also worked out. “Neither do most people, I think. Where I’m from we call them mysteries of the faith.”

It wasn’t until after I’d said it that I realized how melancholy I sounded.

If melancholy is the right word. Perhaps rueful would be better.

And that left a bitter taste in my mouth that wouldn’t shift no matter how hard I tried to spit it out, and which filled me with an almost nauseous need to purge myself of … something.

“Tell me,” said Q.

And I did. I told her everything.

It took a long time, so long that I was still speaking when we left the common room and went back to our quarters, and even then I left a fair bit out.

There’s too much of a person to share it all in one evening.

But I told her a lot. Certainly I told her more than I’m telling you.

And if you resent that, I’m not sorry. What a woman shares with a companion, even a new companion, in the dark of a tiny room in a cheap inn on Europa and what she shares with the entire system in a published memoir are different things.

I told her the parts that mattered. That I had been born in a faith I had mostly abandoned and in a body I had mostly reshaped.

That I’d been wandering the stars for more than half of my adult life and that I had always assumed I would know what I was looking for when I found it but that I’d been dead fucking wrong every single time so far.

Then, as if testing that theory, I told her she was beautiful.

I hadn’t been drinking, but it had been late. We’d gone to bed by that point and were lying face-to-face in the night, only the faint glow of Q’s markings letting us see one another. And I never meant to say it. It just fell out of my mouth like a baby tooth.

Her face scrunched up like she was trying to say about three things at once and couldn’t quite get any of them to fit. “Quare dici?” she managed eventually, and she sounded suspicious. I would have too.

I rolled onto my back, or at least as far onto my back as I could in a bed that had definitely been designed for a single occupant. “Forget it,” I told her.

“Quare?”

“I just…” I covered my face with my hands. This probably wasn’t a conversation I wanted to be having. “Sometimes I get in my head and I say things that don’t mean anything and— Fuck, I don’t even know how much of this you understand.”

With my face covered, I couldn’t see her, but I felt her fingertips brush my wrist. “Satis,” she said. “Enough.”

Carefully taking my hands away, I turned my head to look at her. “If I said”—this was a bad idea—“that I wanted you to kiss me.”

She didn’t reply. At least not verbally. But if she’d understood nothing else, she definitely understood that.

With a tenderness that I’d hoped for but not dared to expect, she pressed her lips to mine.

I kept as still as I possibly could, barely daring to breathe in case I broke the moment.

In the cold, it was the warmth of her I noticed the most, the heat of her breath, her hands as she cupped my face as if she feared to break me.

Which was, in so many ways, the opposite of what I wanted.

“Good?” she asked, possibly because in my stillness I was giving her precisely zero signals.

I just about managed a soft yes in reply.

So she kissed me again, tentative, almost like she was exploring me. And I wanted so badly to be explored. Her tongue touched just a moment against mine and the rush of it was so sudden and so welcome that I nearly bit the inside of my own mouth.

“Good?” she asked again.

Again I just about managed a yes. And the part of me that was lost to wanting, that had been lost to wanting since I came to Europa … since I left Deimos … since I was born … that part of me whispered that if I’d embraced a bad idea, I might as well embrace a worse one.

“Would you”—it was harder to get words out now, because when she wasn’t kissing me I was swallowing my own tongue with needing her to kiss me—“would you understand if I said I wanted you to fuck me?”

We were too close for me to see her lips, but I thought I saw her smile. Then she leaned very close and said, softly into my ear, “Intellego.”

What with only having two sets of clothes apart from the environment suit, and what with Europa being incredibly freezing all the damned time, I’d gone to bed in the same loose-smock and polymer pants combo I’d been walking around in for the past few days.

I was suddenly very aware that I was a mess and probably stank.

Then again, Q had also been reduced to sharing a bed with a stranger in the worst inn in Cthonius Linea, so she probably had low standards.

Either way, she eased my top over my head. I was equal parts comforted by the care she was taking and frustrated that she wasn’t being just a touch more forceful. After all, I’d said fuck me, not make love to me.

She traced kisses down my neck and nipped, just a little, at my collarbone with her teeth.

“Good?” she asked. “Bad?”

“Good,” I replied, and she bit me again, a little harder this time. I stifled a gasp.

“Passer, deliciae meae puellae,” she whispered. Her lips were passing between my breasts now, her fingertips tracing the arcs of my hips. “Quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere.”

I wanted, very badly—I can’t really describe how badly—to reach up and touch her, but I kept my hands firmly by my sides.

It’s a game I play with myself sometimes.

I’m not sure what the rules are meant to be, or what the prize is.

Deep down, I think maybe I’m trying to stick it to all the people who told me I didn’t have any discipline.

Because trying to placate old men you knew a decade ago is a really healthy thing to do during sex.

“Cui primum digitum dare appetenti.” Her tongue darted lightly around my navel and she began slipping my pants down far, far more slowly than I wanted her to. “Et acris solet incitare morsus.” She bit me again, just over the hip bone, and I dug my nails into my palms with anticipation.

When her fingertips, spit-moistened and gentle, slid inside me, my mind went as it always did to Aphrodite Terra.

I’d never been there, of course, not personally.

But the reconfigurative subdivision of the biotechnological wing of the great Venusian pharma-state ran every cyberdoc and geneshack corewards of Neptune.

I closed my eyes tight and tried to just be. And in some ways that was easy because with an instinct that made me feel weirdly, uncomfortably seen, Q was sending ripples of sensation through me that even Aphrodite Pharma State couldn’t distract me from.

“Good?” she asked.

And this time I just nodded.

“More?”

I nodded again.

Getting to where I was, to the body I was in, had cost me.

Like, literally cost. I’d run up debts that I’d never be free of to a pharmaceutical conglomerate that would track me down and render me into seed-base if I missed a repayment.

It was moments like these that made it worth it, that made me feel … mine.

Still, I didn’t dare reach out to Q to touch her. Because I was selfish and afraid and given over to a moment I didn’t want to end. Instead, I made myself an altar for her, murmured yes and please and yes again to her every touch.

In the light of her markings—which I was beginning to think shifted with her mood and which were fading now through colors I’d never seen them take on before—I could see Q’s deep, unending eyes focused on me.

And for some cold, inexplicable reason I felt more naked than I ever had in my life as she touched me, then watched for my reaction, then touched me again just a little differently—harder or softer or just slightly to the left.

I wasn’t sure if I felt cared for or studied, adored or dissected, and I wasn’t sure which I wanted to feel.

All the while her lips stayed curled into a little half smile, and I was seized by a barbed desire to please her.

Worse, that desire was tinged with the knowledge that little would please her more than being myself, and that was something I hated to do.

But I tried to be a kind of honest, to let myself cry if I had to and to only beg if I really meant it.

And I did, in the end, really mean it. Because she had an instinct for withholding that was the best kind of agony, and though we shared few common words there are other languages.

I let her dance her will across me as I lay ever more breathless and ever more desperate and when I did, at last, reach out for her she took me by the wrist, kissed my fingertips exactly once, then guided my hand back to my side.

Which left me with a faint sense that I’d lost, and that I wouldn’t mind losing again.

And all the while, I listened to her whispering in a language I didn’t understand and, when I came, I bit my tongue so hard that I tasted blood.

Afterwards, I lay in her arms feeling restless and more unsatisfied than I had any right to be. I was still naked, she still fully clothed, and I shrank into her feeling a sudden, inexplicable urge to break. To curl up into a ball and start weeping.

“Thank you,” I told her, my voice on the edge of cracking. “And I’m— Thank you.”

She made a quiet shushing noise and kissed the back of my neck. “Dormi.”

A hot wad of undifferentiated emotion was gathering in my stomach, a crucible mix of guilt and gratitude all smelted together with a shame I should have put aside long ago.

When I was barely more than a child, I had asked a preacher why so few people seemed to be happy. He’d smiled with white, perfect, extremely expensive teeth and told me that only one answer made sense: that very few people deserved to be.

Of all the lessons I’d been taught by the faith, that was the one I’d found it hardest to stop believing.